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Supporters celebrate the victory of Brazil presidential candidate Jair Bolsonaro on Sunday, October 28. The scene took place outside his house in Barra de Tijuca, Rio de Janeiro, with thousands of his supporters celebrating with fireworks and waving Brazilian flags. (Photo by Phil Clarke Hill/In Pictures for Getty Images)

The morning started off to screams of Ele não out the windows of apartment buildings in the Higienopolis neighborhood of São Paulo on Sunday. It means “not him,” a popular rallying cry led by women activist groups against right-wing presidential candidate Jair Bolsonaro. It was the neighborhood where former president Fernando Henrique Cardoso and former central banker Henrique Meirelles would go to vote. The screamers hoped, perhaps, to be heard one last time. Boy, were they not.

By Sunday night São Paulo looked like Brazil had just won the World Cup. Car horns were blazing. Fireworks were being shot off in random neighborhoods. People were waving Brazilian flags. Bolsonaro won, as expected, with 55% of the vote. He beat Fernando Haddad of the Workers' Party (PT), who under any other circumstance, would have beat Bolsonaro hands-down.

But thanks to the Petrobras scandal that took place for roughly ten years under their rule, the electorate went for a lower-house Congressman who is one part Donald Trump, one part Rodrigo Duterte, and has a penchant for saying things just as polemic. Bolsonaro won with over 10 million more votes than Haddad in spite of himself. He won because the infamous Petrobras Car Wash scandal nearly destroyed Brazil, leading to high unemployment and a rise in homicides that double the daily rate in drug-war-infested Mexico. Bolsonaro won because PT is seen as bringing all of this to pass.

A supporter of the left-wing presidential candidate for the Workers Party (PT), Fernando Haddad, reacts to the election outcome in São Paulo, Brazil, on October 28, 2018. (Photo by Fabio Vieira/FotoRua/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

“Bolsonaro's victory consolidates a move that’s already been going on in the Brazilian market for a few weeks now because his win was anticipated,” says Pedro Paulo Silveira, chief economist with Nova Futura Investimentos in São Paulo. “This should continue, but it will eventually stabilize and people will wait to see what measures this new government will actually take on taxes, on government debt, on privatizations and on pension reform.”

The race was Bolsonaro’s to lose. Many people in Brazil said that a rise in crime, coupled with the Petrobras bribe scheme had people turning away from centrist candidates.

Haddad quickly and errantly tied his fortunes to the incarcerated former president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, now serving a 12-year prison term for his role in the Petrobras contract rigging scandal. That inevitably turned off voters in the north who have voted for his party in the last four presidential elections.

At least 33 million people either did not vote or annulled their vote.

PT voters believe Lula is a victim of political persecution, a belief that does not sit with the majority of the electorate, according to polling firm Datafolha.

Bolsonaro is no outsider. In fact, Haddad has less time in politics than he does, and zero time in the capital. Haddad was a one-term mayor of São Paulo. Bolsonaro is a Rio de Janeiro congressman who has come out swinging against his corrupt state. He joined the military during the dictatorship years and rose to the rank of captain before retiring shortly after the dictatorship disbanded.Bolsonaro's service has come under fire in the press, particularly in the foreign political press who have all played up Bolsonaro’s comments on longing for the law and order of the dictatorship years. He also said the military should have killed more communists who made up at least part of the anti-government movement at the time.

Economically, those years were known as the Brazilian Miracle years thanks to large infrastructure projects that helped develop the country away from its coastline. But it was also known as a Cold War hot zone, with the military rulers arresting and often torturing people, some of whom would later become PT party leaders in Brazil’s young democracy. The history of Brazil’s dictatorship years and Bolsonaro’s affiliation with it has many on the left worried about real political persecution. Haddad’s pick for vice president, Manuela de Avila, was from the Communist Party of Brazil.

On Sunday, no one was hard pressed to find images of college-aged Brazilians crying in each other’s arms, reminiscent of Hillary Clinton's shocking loss to Trump in Nov. 2016.

Jair and First Lady Michelle Bolsonaro pose at an election booth in Rio de Janeiro on Sunday, Oct. 28, 2018. His victory is yet another rebut of Lula's Workers’ Party. (Ricardo Moraes/Pool Photo via AP)

Still, most of Brazil is in a quiet celebratory mode today. So is the business community.

“Bolsonaro's election will have a dual impact on the economy,” says Guto Ferreira, president of the Brazilian Industrial Development Agency, a lobbying firm working to promote advanced sectors of the economy. “Without a doubt, you will have a more optimistic view from international investors in Brazil, especially if reforms go well,” he says.

Brazil’s economy is a mess. Bolsonaro has more support in Congress now that his party, the Social Liberal Party (a misnomer, since it’s really conservative) is the second-largest party in Congress after the PT. They also have more allies. Should Brazil fail at making some key reforms, particularly to public pensions, there is a chance that the country’s public debt will get out of control and usher in a return of the International Monetary Fund. Such is the hair-trigger alert Brazil’s economic future faces at this time.

Not all women hate Bolsonaro. Enough of them helped the firebrand congressman make it all the way to the top of Brazil’s highly dysfunctional politics. Will he change things? Nobody knows. But voters are counting on him. (AP Photo/Leo Correa)

For now, Brazilians are by and large relieved that PT has lost again. Bolsonaro said that PT founder and two-term president Lula would “die in prison.” Haddad is back to talking about persecution, something he has largely refrained from discussing on the campaign trail and before that.

Brazil’s Duterte, or better yet, Brazil’s Little Trump (Trumpinho), has a sizable fan base. But they were not enough to put him over the top. The anti-PT vote put him over the top, and it is unclear how many of them really have Bolsonaro’s back. Many voters chose Bolsonaro with a “God help us” mindset in the voting booth. Others opted out of voting for either candidate. PT was no longer legitimate. And Bolsonaro was a bit too crass for many voters.

“It really was like we won the World Cup yesterday,” says Cristina Almeida, a publishing professional from São Paulo. “It was surprising. I didn’t think Bolsonaro had this much support. But it makes sense to me now that he does. No one voted for him because he is charismatic and brilliant. They voted for him because they didn’t want PT in power,” she says. Almeida voted for neither candidate. She says it was the first time she did that. “Bolsonaro doesn’t represent me, but Haddad and his insistence on associating himself with Lula while pretending to be independent doesn’t work for me. This country has suffered a lot under PT. You have the biggest capital city in South America that looks abandoned in parts of town. Rio de Janeiro, too. There are no jobs and none on the horizon and no security. If it’s like that in São Paulo and Rio, imagine poorer cities. This is why people voted for Bolsonaro. Whether he changes that, nobody knows.”

I've spent 20 years as a reporter for the best in the business, including as a Brazil-based staffer for WSJ. Since 2011, I focus on business and investing in the big emerging markets exclusively for Forbes.